Facebook, as everyone knows, is the devil. And Facebook in December is the devil’s armpit. We are approximately one week from the absolute nadir of it all, when the whole platform will collapse in on itself in a dismal, needy flurry of jet-propelled Aren’t-I-Lucky consumerist gift-haul photos. But by then at least we’ll all be hardened towards it, because by then we’ll have suffered through an entire month of Elf on the Shelf.

Now, I know that the Guardian doesn’t have a particularly festive reputation, and I realise that what I’m about to say isn’t exactly going to help this reputation. But hear me out: all I want for Christmas is to stamp on Elf on the Shelf’s throat until it coughs up blood and dies.

I know this is going to sound like hyperbole, given everything that has happened this year, but Elf on the Shelf is easily the most violently dreadful thing to happen in 2016. How I long for the happier days of 2015, when nobody knew what an Elf on the Shelf was, back before it spawned and multiplied like the Zika virus and threatened to monopolise every home in the country. What I’d give to go back in time, Inception myself inside the mind of the Elf on the Shelf creator and scream the word “bastards” at them so loudly that they forgot to ever invent the bloody thing.

There is a chance – a minuscule chance, admittedly – that you don’t know what an Elf on the Shelf is. If that’s the case, allow me to fill you in. An Elf on the Shelf is a small, posable toy elf that costs £31.95 and ostensibly acts as a scout for Father Christmas.

You put the elf on a shelf in early December and inform your children that he will always be watching and judging them for signs of bad behaviour. Then, just as your children learn to fear this nightmarish, murderer-looking totalitarian snitch, you start to move it around at night. Your children will wake up, look at the empty shelf, wonder where the elf has gone, and then find him, say, next to the toothbrushes in the bathroom. “Wow, this elf really enjoys scrutinising your entire life for traces of unacceptable behaviour,” you tell your child, who has now subconsciously made the decision to grow up under a pseudonym in an off-grid hut with tape covering their laptop’s webcam, just to escape the relentless corrosive judgment of the Elf on the Shelf.

Although Elf on the Shelf feels like it has gained ubiquity overnight, in reality it has enjoyed a sinister slow burn. It began 12 years ago as a self-published picture book in the US, and has gradually snowballed to the point that transatlantic success felt painfully inevitable. There were murmurings about Elf on the Shelf in Britain last year, but this is the year when it has really taken hold. Type “Elf” into Google and one of the first autocomplete suggestions is “on the Shelf”. The Elf on the Shelf Twitter account has 138,000 followers. According to Google News, almost 20 new articles about Elf on the Shelf are being published every single day. If you’ve got Instagram and a follow a certain type of person, you will see just how unstoppable this mangy little intruder has become.

The thing that most rankles about all this is just how aggressively Elf on the Shelf wants to become a timeless Christmas tradition. Every Elf on the Shelf comes emblazoned with the phrase “A Christmas Tradition”, which is immediately undone by the slightly needier “Adopt a New Family Tradition This Holiday Season” right underneath it. So it’s not really a tradition at all, but it figures that it can be if it tells you often enough. It’s the festive equivalent of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again hat, determined to string you along until it’s too late. It’s a post-truth doll for a post-truth age.

And this hurts, because Christmas traditions are hard-won things. For example, my wife and I come from vastly different backgrounds, and Christmas Day is essentially a battle between the pair of us to see who gets to relive their childhood most vividly. Her dream Christmas is ornate and frilly, involving long walks in the country and carefully staggered presents that, for some reason, must definitely include a walnut in a shoe. Mine basically just involves me walking downstairs with a hangover, tearing open all my presents in 30 seconds flat like some ridiculous fat Godzilla, and then lying on the sofa with a tummy ache for the rest of the day. Both days are equally valid, because they have both been carefully forged over decades. And whatever ungainly walnuts-and-tummy-ache compromise we will end up reaching as a married couple will be just as valid, because we will have made it ourselves.

But buying into a sinister, scowling, Santa-hatted Chucky doll whose sole purpose is to intimidate children into meekness, simply because it has the word “tradition” printed across its front, isn’t valid at all. It’s terrifying and cynical, it sends a bizarre message to children and it couldn’t be any less Christmassy if it was a bucket of vomit that sing-cries The Greatest Love of All whenever it senses that someone is near. Honestly, you may as well wrap tinsel around a CCTV camera and pass that off as a fun new festive activity.

In summary, I would rather die than live under the harrowing surveillance-state gaze of Elf on the Shelf. Have a lovely Christmas, everyone.